The college advising landscape
College advising during high school can work to meaningfully increase college enrollment, especially for student populations that are generally underserved by college access programming. Evidence from various large-scale college advising programs shows that effects on college access can vary depending on factors like which students are targeted, what kind of advising is delivered, and who the advisors are. The high variation in program design has made it a challenge for states and evaluators alike to identify and implement what best “works” in pre-college advising. Tennessee has invested heavily in programs that aim to increase college access and attainment by reducing costs and barriers to higher education. These include the longstanding TN Promise and Reconnect free tuition programs that reduce the cost of postsecondary education. However, beyond financial aid, Tennessee offers programs like Advise TN, a scaled statewide college advising and coaching program that hires and places advisors in low college-going high schools across the state with the express purpose of getting more students to enroll in college. The program targets schools that have below-average college attendance rates and no other college access programming (like College Advising Corps or GEAR UP).
What potential do college advising programs like this hold to increase college going? And, why do they work? We asked this question using Advise TN as a case study, and explored the design, implementation, and effects of the program through a close partnership with the state of Tennessee and the Advise TN program staff.
What do we know works—and why?
In the broad landscape of college advising in high schools, there is a lot of variation in the types of interventions that programs employ. Generally, we know that programs with more intense, wrap-around services, close advising or mentoring, and even financial incentives are more effective at increasing college going than lighter-touch programs. We also know that programs that focus efforts on direct college advising and tangible technical help (like filling out the FAFSA) are more effective than those that deliver more general advice or counseling. These findings hold too when considering the impact of on-campus advising and coaching once students have enrolled.
Who fills the role of advisor matters too. Advisors with more educational or professional experience tend to have stronger effects on their students’ college going as compared to recent college graduates, also known as “near-peer” advisors. Advisors that specialize in delivering college-access programing also tend to boost college enrollment more than teachers or counselors with other responsibilities that are trained to deliver advising services.
Several large-scale advising programs leverage some of these elements. The Boston-based BottomLine initiative connects advisors to low-income students that apply and provides support throughout the college application cycle, especially with things like FAFSA completion. A similar program to Advise TN exists in Texas, where recent college graduates are trained and deployed as advisors to support low-income and first-generation students. Results on evaluations of these programs, however, have been mixed. While BottomLine increased college enrollment by a significant margin (5 percentage points), results on Advise TX did not yield effects on overall college going.
So, when does advising work? The case of Advise TN
In 2023, we began a research-practice partnership with the Advise TN program staff and others at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC). Within this partnership, we sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the program at increasing college-going rates. We also wanted to explore the mechanisms through which the program worked in the hopes of learning lessons about advising more broadly—with an explicit goal of providing actionable insights for advising practice locally and nationally.
Our efforts started with a traditional evaluation of the program. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compared college-going rates among students at Advise TN schools to those at non-Advise schools across the state, before and after the program was implemented in 2017.
We found that Advise TN increased college going by about 4 percentage points, or 8% over the baseline. Figure 1 shows the results on college going overall, and heterogeneous effects by subgroup. Given what we know about the track records of other college access advising programs, Advise TN appeared to be quite effective relative to similar, scaled statewide advising interventions. Moreover, the program shows significant improvements in college going for all student subgroups, with especially large increases among Hispanic students, and those at rural high schools.
Our first hunch as to why this might be was that Advise TN advisors were spending a lot of time with students filling out difficult and technical paperwork. As part of our research-practice partnership, we traveled to Tennessee to meet with Advise advisors and sit in on a few hour-long 1-on-1 meetings with students. What we observed was that advisors were helping students with the nitty-gritty of applying to college, which includes tasks like resetting passwords, calling parents to answer FAFSA form questions, and submitting emails for teacher recommendations.
We found a similar focus on application specifics in our evaluation. Using data from THEC, we also looked at the effect of advisors on FAFSA completion and applications to the statewide Tennessee Promise, both of which increased significantly (7 percentage points and 4 percentage points, respectively). Figure 2 shows these results, with large positive impacts across the board.
The mechanics of effective advising
The overall quality and intensity of advising that Advise TN delivers to students seem to be the primary reasons why the program is effective at increasing college-going. Aligned with best practices in college advising, Advise TN advisors specialize in delivering only college-access services. The advisors all have dedicated space within their high schools, and they don’t have any other teaching or counseling duties. Most Advise advisors are mid-career professionals. Many of them have master’s degrees, and most have previous experience in the same high school or community where they do their advising.
The kind of advising that the program delivers is also especially targeted and intense. In addition to THEC outcome data, we also analyzed meeting notes and advisor-student interaction data from the client-relations management software that the program uses. Using these data, we were able to create measures of “intensity” of advising (how many times a student met with their advisor) and “modality” of advising (whether the meetings were in person or virtual).
First, unsurprisingly, students who actually met with their Advise TN advisor were more likely to enroll in college. While the overall average effect of having an Advise TN advisor in a high school was a 4-percentage-point increase in that high school’s college-going rate, students who met with an Advise TN advisor were 7 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than those who had no record of meeting with their advisor. Of course, this comes with a caveat—it could be that students more likely to go to college are also more likely to meet with their advisor. Nevertheless, engagement data offer a window into how the intensity of advising correlates with college outcomes. We found that students who met more often with their advisor, and met more often in person, also had higher average rates of college going.
Moving forward
Programs that target first-generation and low-income students throughout the education pipeline are increasingly threatened by the Trump administration, and by state governments working within tighter fiscal and ideological constraints. Lean initiatives like Advise TN that deliver on the promise of college access (to a relatively reasonable tune of $2.4 million annually for a program that serves roughly 14,000 high school juniors and seniors per year in 33 high schools across the state) will be increasingly needed in a landscape of scrutiny on access programs. Especially as national programs are threatened or cut, state legislatures have the opportunity to invest in efforts that meet those gaps.
The case of Advise TN shows that those efforts seem to benefit from state support—not just financially, but in terms of the time and intention behind the program. The centralized Advise TN staff at the state level actively support the advisors with ongoing professional development and regular statewide convenings aimed at building connections and continuity across advisors.
The commitment on the part of Advise TN program staff and other statewide education entities have paid off, and then some. Hundreds more students that would not have accessed postsecondary education were incentivized to do so directly because of Advise TN advisors. The effect of those hundreds more college-educated Tennesseans is yet to be fully realized, but it is worth contemplating just how much can be gained from investments like these moving forward.
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